Patton Oswalt

OF ‘M.O.D.O.K.’ ON HULU

Over the years, you must have thought about whether you could be a Marvel character. Which did you see yourself as in those days?

Really good question. Obviously, when you’re a little kid, you want to be Spiderman, because he’s the coolest. He’s just the coolest. You just want that so badly. When I got a little older, maybe one of the X-Men. But through the ‘80s, the X-Men were cool but they were also tormented, so I was like, “I already have enough torment as a teen. Do I want to pile more torment on top of myself?” So I’m happy that I ended up with M.O.D.O.K., because at my age, he gets to sit down the whole time. It’s

great.

When you were coming up as a stand-up and you were standing on stage and just saying, “Please, God. Let them laugh,” in the back of your mind did you ever think, “You know what, voiceover. I’m thinking voiceover?” Because you’ve made quite a career of it.

Yeah. I was thinking I would be lucky if I got to do voiceover someday. I was always a huge animation fan. I would go to Spike and Mike’s animation festival all the time and watch all the new, edgy cartoons. But in my mind, I couldn’t imagine how you would get into that world, because that was still coming out of the world of one cartoon, one voiceover guy. It used to be like Warner Bros. was just Mel Blanc and he did everything, and I couldn’t imagine that they would start using different people to do different roles. So, luckily, as I grew older, the industry grew older and I got

to start doing that. It’s a great, great thing to get to fall into.